I write about startups, scaling service based businesses and marketing
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
A business can invest considerable time and effort into developing a content marketing strategy – and yet it could still fall short of expectations. Why does this happen? In my experience, the No. 1 reason that content marketing strategies fail is because they’re misaligned with the business’s core values and goals. The problem is that too many businesses tend to put content marketing into its own silo, and push the content team to focus on quantity of content instead of quality. For these businesses, seeing fresh and appealing content getting posted every week or every day – on the web and on social media – is the extent of their content marketing strategy.
The problem is that great content is only effective if it drives sales and growth for the company as a whole, and the only way to ensure content is driving profitability is to align the content marketing strategy with the business’s mission. I recently wrote about the key reasons that every business should take the time to do this alignment; you can find that .
The next logical question is how a business can actually execute this crucial task, and that question is the focus of this article. Without further ado, let’s explore the five key steps that your business should take to effectively align your content marketing strategy with your organizational mission.
Give content marketing a seat at the executive leadership table: As I mentioned earlier, businesses should never, ever relegate their content marketing to the sidelines. In fact, the most effective way to ensure a content marketing team is plugged into the organization is to give the team a seat at the executive leadership table. When a business makes this change, it’s saying, “Content marketing is at the core of how we represent ourselves to the world, and is thus as important as finance or personnel or sales.” A seat at the leadership table also gives the content marketing team an opportunity to engage in strategy development at the highest level. When your business is having discussions about its values and long-term goals, for example, content marketing won’t just hear about it offhandedly afterward – content marketing becomes part of the development and refinement of those values and goals and, in fact, is given a direct mandate to create content that advances those values and goals.
Create messaging architecture for your content marketing team: Messaging architecture is a set of broad, short statements that conveys the strategic communications goals of all content produced by the organization. Messaging architecture for a financial institution, for example, could be something as simple as “We are trailblazers in our industry,” “We have deep, narrow expertise,” and “We serve an exclusive class of investors.” The power of messaging architecture is that it relates directly back to a business’s mission statement, which means that when content is created around these core messages, the content is able to advance the business’s overall interests – in this case, it can help cement the financial institution’s image as an innovator and an authority for a particular investor class.
If this is your first time reading my column, or reading anything on marketing, you might be shocked to hear that content marketing has become quite a big thing as of late. For everyone else who is well aware of this fact, I’m glad to have you on board. Are you ready to learn the strategies that will allow any company, yes even the small ones, to have a content marketing campaign that will bring a tear to your eye?
Awesome! Let’s go!
The Big Bad Content Monster
Let’s first start by tackling the creature that lives under every marketer’s bed, the content monster. It’s big, it’s hairy, and it’s a challenge for anyone to generate enough content to feed its appetite. It’s also a metaphor for your content marketing needs. Once you start a content marketing initiative, you’ll need to constantly feed it.
So, how can small companies possibly compete with their larger competitors that are able to shovel content into the monster’s gullet? You do this by seeing content everywhere and harvesting it.
What do I mean by this? Well, most marketers mistakenly think that content is only in written and graphical form. But you need to embrace the idea that content is just a packaging of your message to your customers. Therefore, it can take the shape of images, blog posts, podcasts, videos, vlogs (video blogs), quizzes, and hundreds of other formats. But in order to identify it, you need to be looking for it. Thus, you should develop a content radar.
Content Radar
In order to have a precisely targeted content radar that is able to identify content opportunities in the most mundane of settings, you need to become acutely aware of everything that is going on inside and around your business. For instance, there are probably a dozen times a day you have a thought similar to: “Well, that’s really cool. I should remember that for later.”
Five Ways To Make Your Content Marketing Succeed
ReplyDeleteMike Templeman ,
Contributor
I write about startups, scaling service based businesses and marketing
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
A business can invest considerable time and effort into developing a content marketing strategy – and yet it could still fall short of expectations. Why does this happen? In my experience, the No. 1 reason that content marketing strategies fail is because they’re misaligned with the business’s core values and goals. The problem is that too many businesses tend to put content marketing into its own silo, and push the content team to focus on quantity of content instead of quality. For these businesses, seeing fresh and appealing content getting posted every week or every day – on the web and on social media – is the extent of their content marketing strategy.
The problem is that great content is only effective if it drives sales and growth for the company as a whole, and the only way to ensure content is driving profitability is to align the content marketing strategy with the business’s mission. I recently wrote about the key reasons that every business should take the time to do this alignment; you can find that .
The next logical question is how a business can actually execute this crucial task, and that question is the focus of this article. Without further ado, let’s explore the five key steps that your business should take to effectively align your content marketing strategy with your organizational mission.
Give content marketing a seat at the executive leadership table: As I mentioned earlier, businesses should never, ever relegate their content marketing to the sidelines. In fact, the most effective way to ensure a content marketing team is plugged into the organization is to give the team a seat at the executive leadership table. When a business makes this change, it’s saying, “Content marketing is at the core of how we represent ourselves to the world, and is thus as important as finance or personnel or sales.” A seat at the leadership table also gives the content marketing team an opportunity to engage in strategy development at the highest level. When your business is having discussions about its values and long-term goals, for example, content marketing won’t just hear about it offhandedly afterward – content marketing becomes part of the development and refinement of those values and goals and, in fact, is given a direct mandate to create content that advances those values and goals.
Create messaging architecture for your content marketing team: Messaging architecture is a set of broad, short statements that conveys the strategic communications goals of all content produced by the organization. Messaging architecture for a financial institution, for example, could be something as simple as “We are trailblazers in our industry,” “We have deep, narrow expertise,” and “We serve an exclusive class of investors.” The power of messaging architecture is that it relates directly back to a business’s mission statement, which means that when content is created around these core messages, the content is able to advance the business’s overall interests – in this case, it can help cement the financial institution’s image as an innovator and an authority for a particular investor class.
ReplyDeleteHow Small Businesses Can Tackle Content Marketing
ReplyDeleteMike Templeman ,
Contributor
If this is your first time reading my column, or reading anything on marketing, you might be shocked to hear that content marketing has become quite a big thing as of late. For everyone else who is well aware of this fact, I’m glad to have you on board. Are you ready to learn the strategies that will allow any company, yes even the small ones, to have a content marketing campaign that will bring a tear to your eye?
Awesome! Let’s go!
The Big Bad Content Monster
Let’s first start by tackling the creature that lives under every marketer’s bed, the content monster. It’s big, it’s hairy, and it’s a challenge for anyone to generate enough content to feed its appetite. It’s also a metaphor for your content marketing needs. Once you start a content marketing initiative, you’ll need to constantly feed it.
So, how can small companies possibly compete with their larger competitors that are able to shovel content into the monster’s gullet? You do this by seeing content everywhere and harvesting it.
What do I mean by this? Well, most marketers mistakenly think that content is only in written and graphical form. But you need to embrace the idea that content is just a packaging of your message to your customers. Therefore, it can take the shape of images, blog posts, podcasts, videos, vlogs (video blogs), quizzes, and hundreds of other formats. But in order to identify it, you need to be looking for it. Thus, you should develop a content radar.
Content Radar
In order to have a precisely targeted content radar that is able to identify content opportunities in the most mundane of settings, you need to become acutely aware of everything that is going on inside and around your business. For instance, there are probably a dozen times a day you have a thought similar to: “Well, that’s really cool. I should remember that for later.”
Great
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your comment.
Deleteplease let me know any content you make want me add.